Griffith Review 60 by Julianne Schultz

Author:Julianne Schultz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2018-04-06T05:25:03+00:00

ESSAY

Lost opportunities

Prospects for a treaty

Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh

GRIFFITH REVIEW IS not, according to its ‘Writers’ Guidelines’, an ‘academic journal’. This leads me to pause and consider how I can establish what I want to be the starting point for this essay, which is that Australia cannot ‘make peace and firmer ground for laws, policies and outcomes that improve Indigenous and non-Indigenous life’ unless it accepts the need for Indigenous peoples to exercise a high degree of autonomy and govern their own affairs.

As an academic, my normal approach would be to provide numerous citations to the growing body of long-term economic research from the United States, Canada and Australia that provides definitive evidence for the link between political autonomy and Indigenous economic development. I would cite an equally impressive body of evidence from these countries and from New Zealand which demonstrates that health, education, housing and other public services are much more effective in ‘improving Indigenous life’ when they are designed and delivered by Indigenous people themselves. Finally, to complete the trifecta, I would refer to the large body of evidence which shows that unilateral policy interventions by non-Indigenous governments rarely improve Indigenous lives, and that where they do, the impact is short-term, and is followed by debilitating effects on Indigenous capacity and confidence.

These findings should not come as a surprise. In relation to public services, Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures, values, priorities and ‘ways of working’ differ markedly, and non-Indigenous politicians and bureaucrats in Australia have limited understanding of the Indigenous sphere. This latter point is documented in relation to the Australian Public Service, for example, by the Aboriginal scholar Steven Larkin in his doctoral thesis, Race Matters: Indigenous Employment in the Australian Public Service. Drawing on interviews with non-Indigenous senior executive service officers working in Indigenous policy, Larkin shows that their cultural competence is seriously deficient and, underlying this, that they regard white knowledge, organisation and modes of operating as inherently superior to Indigenous ones. This is hardly a promising basis for the design and delivery of effective Indigenous policy.

The link between Indigenous autonomy and economic achievement is also unsurprising. Economic success requires the ability to grasp economic opportunity when it arises, and to take the risks that are inherent in all economic ventures capable of generating a substantial return. Both require autonomy from stultifying bureaucracies of the type that have historically governed Indigenous affairs in settler societies. For Indigenous peoples, economic success also requires a capacity to reconcile the demands of the market with those of culture, requiring an intimate understanding of the latter and the constraints and opportunities it creates. Finally, the existence of economic opportunity gives rise to conflicts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests. If Indigenous peoples cannot exercise the autonomy to pursue their own interests, non-Indigenous interests will inevitably prevail. All of these circumstances help to explain why Native American tribes that remained outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs after 1934 enjoyed, over a period of seventy-five years, growth in per capita incomes half as great again as tribes that remained under the Federal Bureau’s influence.

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